Noel Fielding: Luxury Comedy series one was ‘a sort of frantic, psychedelic panic attack, with charm’

‘A bit more palatable’? Luxury Comedy series two starts on July 31 on E4 (Picture: Channel 4)

Eccentric comedian Noel Fielding, 41, has a new series of his surreal TV show Luxury Comedy out, but in real life he insists he’s a lot more sensible these days.

You’re pretty famous for your outfits. What are you wearing today?

I’ve got a boiler suit on but it’s tied around my waist, then I’ve got a flowery top on and Terry de Havilland snakeskin boots. I’ve also dyed my hair blond. I look a bit like a cross between Princess Di and Myra Hindley.

That sounds terrifying…

It really is. What are you wearing?

Er, honestly? I’m wearing gym kit.

You totally could have lied there. I guess I could have too, though. I could have said I was wearing a thong with a Ronald McDonald wig.

So you play a wide array of characters in Luxury Comedy. Which is your favourite?

I really like playing Fantasy Man, a sort of modern-day Don Quixote. He thinks he’s on a kind of mission but he’s actually just in Hackney. In the new series I’ve been concentrating a bit more on letting other people play the characters – I mainly just play the coffee shop worker, who’s basically a fictionalised version of me.

Are the two seasons quite different?

The first one was a bit sketchy and weird, a sort of frantic, psychedelic panic attack. With charm. But with this one we’ve tried to make it lighter, with more of a story. We’ve tried to get all the aspects we liked with the first season but make it a bit more palatable.

In one of many more ‘interesting’ outfits backstage at London Fashion Week AW14 (Picture: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images)

I find it hard to picture you sitting down at a desk and writing this surreal stuff. Do you sit down at 9am with a pen or head to Starbucks with a MacBook?

Nah, the guy who does the animation and I have an office and we do it together. I pace the room and talk a lot while he writes stuff down. We spend a long time on the concepts.

Why did you choose to set it in a coffee shop?

Well, we start the show by laughing about how it might look like it’s going to be a boring sitcom. But I think the mundane setting helps contrast with the magical stuff that’s going on, all the animation and fantastical storylines etc. And the café is at the foot of a Hawaiian volcano after all.

Your own personal life has calmed down a bit these days, hasn’t it?

Totally. When you get a bit well known, you feel like you’re getting the keys to the city. You get invited to a million parties and meet all these fascinating people. Julian [Barratt – The Mighty Boosh co-writer] hates all that stuff while I sort of embrace it. But then it’s a bit like there’s a party, and then there’s another room in the party where the cool people go, and then there’s another room where the cool, cool people go, and then eventually it’s just you, on your own, in a cubicle. I mean how cool can those parties get?

People have been wondering whether Julian will be in Luxury Comedy series two. Will he?

I did offer him a part and he was going to do it but unfortunately he was just too busy. We’d still love to do a Mighty Boosh film together. We’ve written one half of a film, sort of like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and then we wrote another half, which was an adventure set in the Arctic. But it’s hard to find the time to really commit.

You both have such loyal fans, they’re desperate for a film…

Yeah, but you don’t want to f**k with the formula, that’s the problem. Because they’re so possessive and so crazy about the show, we feel we’d have to do something so good that it can be a bit overwhelming.

You’ve been controversial on Twitter in the past. Are you giving it a miss these days?

I’m quite wary now. You do anything and it’s a story immediately. That business with Waldemar Januszczak [Fielding was accused of telling fans to troll the Sunday Times art critic after he suggested Fielding wasn’t qualified to interview Damien Hirst], wasn’t a spat at all really. We bumped into each other recently and laughed about it.

What do you do in your own free time?

I’m pretty good at tennis. I paint, meditate. I haven’t actually drunk for quite a long time – two months. I feel amazing. I’m getting a lot of stuff done. I’m bored of going out, actually. Staying in is the new going out, I reckon. Isn’t it?

The second season of Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy starts on Thursday on E4. His British tour starts on October 20 at G Live, Guildford.